Five years of Kiva lending and borrowing

Topic

Kiva, the microfinance site, lets you give small loans to people around the world to help them get their small business up and running. This animated map shows how 620,000 funded 615,000 borrowers, from the start of Kiva in 2005 up until now. Watch in full-screen for maximum effect.

Colors indicate loan type, which confused me at first, because I thought the map was saying that specific loan types were only given out during each time of year. It’s actually cycling through the loan types though, so you can see the breakdowns as the animation plays through, and then it shows all loans at once at the end of each year.

The only thing that’s missing are some counters for the amount of money passing hands. It’s been an impressive $240 million in loans around the world with a repayment rate of almost 99 percent.

Cool graphic. I am surprised by how limited the geographic range of borrowers is. Look at 4:23. It makes sense to program development work in particular areas to make it possible to monitor and do outreach, but I wonder why there are so few projects in Brazil, Zambia, Ethiopia, etc.